Alumni News: Dr. Matthew Certo (FCRH '93, GSE '94) and Rashid Ferrod Davis ('03)

The Westwood Regional Board of Education recently approved Ramsey's High School Matthew Certo to take over as new principal of Westwood Regional High School starting this summer. The boards decision to hire Certo at a special meeting May 31st was unanimous, according to board president Carol Mountain. Certo, who served as an assistant principal at Ramsey High School for the past nine years, is in his 19th year as an educator, and earned a doctorate from Columbia University in Educational Administration and an MSE in elementary education from Fordham University (he is also a 1993 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill). To read the full story on NorthJersey.com, click here.

Rashid Ferrod Davis (M.S.Ed. Administration & Supervision '03) is the founding principal of Pathways in Technology Early College High School, and will be one of the principal honorees at the 2012 Education Update Outstanding Educators of the Year on June 25th in New York City. He also participated in Change the Equation's STEM Salon on May 23rd in Washington, DC. The STEM Salon provided a forum for participants to demonstrate how business involvement in school creation can infuse innovation into outdated schooling models, as well as to highlight and discuss how business involvement in creating STEM-focused schools can form new pathways and innovative opportunities for students in post-secondary schooling and careers that education cannot do alone. View a clip from the event below:

Los Ninos Conference Sketches Permanent Effects of Childhood Stress

 700: The number of new neural connections formed every second in the first year of a child’s life.

18 months: The age at which differences in vocabulary appear between children of college-educated parents, and children whose parents did not graduate high school.

90 to 100 percent: The chance of significant developmental delays for a child who experiences risk factors such as poverty, maltreatment, a parent with mental illness or substance abuse problems, hunger, homelessness, or a mother with a low education level.

1 in 3: The odds that a child facing these stressors will later face heart disease.

The fragility of young, rapidly-developing children cannot be understated, said Shelia Evans-Tranumn, Ph.D., on April 18, at the ninth annual Young Child Expo and Conference, co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Education (GSE). Adverse circumstances can interrupt that development severely, and possibly permanently. Kicking off the three-day conference, James J. Hennessy, Ph.D., dean of GSE, presented Evans-Tranumn with the Excellence in Early Childhood award for her “extraordinary championship and advocacy for young children and their families.”

James J. Hennessy, Ph.D., dean of GSE, left, and Vincent Alfonso, Ph.D., professor psychological and educational services, right, present the Excellence in Early Childhood award to Shelia Evans-Tranumn